Fwiw...
...conservatives are about one thing; a conservative society devoid of radical actions, usually on the part of government, local, state and/or federal that leads, inevitably, to unintended consequences.
When things tend to stay the same, or at least evolve and change slowly and in a conservative fashion, people can adjust relatively comfortable. When things change radically, it throws all sorts of things up in the air and makes for often harsh and difficulty, unnecessarily so, adjustments for people, business and society as a whole.
Best example, the Civil War. To a conservative, it was unnecessary and wasteful and achieved change in a radical fashion that lead to all sorts of bad things whereas had the war been avoided by continual compromise and discussion, change would likely have been not so violent, not so costly and in an entirely much more productive fashion albeit much slower.
Slave owners wanted things their own way, right now, as they saw slavery slowly dying. Abolitionists wanted slavery dead as soon as possible. Everyone else, the vast majority, didn't see what the big deal was as long as it didn't affect them. Until the clash came.
When it was over, the slave class was destroyed and lost absolutely everything. The abolitionists got the technical end to slavery. Everyone in the middle bled and lost and paid for the clash and weren't much sure what was won or lost other than the knowledge that life as they knew it, North and South, was gone forever. And slaves ended up with something they vaguely knew they wanted, freedom, but in a fashion that left them completely unprepared to deal with it in a society completely unprepared for them to have it.
The ugliness of the post war years, reconstruction, virtual slavery, bitterness, strife, displacement, exodus, deeply colored ideas of hope and dreams of the future. It took a long, long time to see that what came of it was remotely worth the price.
Conservatives like steady government and society so that people may take advantage of opportunities as they learn and grow whereas 'progressives' and modern liberals want constant radical upheaval in the name of some perceived justice, never mind that transformations often leave those who 'need' this help completely lost as to what to do with the change.